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Judaism in Islamic Lands

The Martyrdom of a Moroccan Jewish Saint by Sharon Vance(Brill's Series in Jewish Studies:Brill Academic) The martyrdom in 1834 of Sol Hatchuel, a Jewish girl from Tangier, traumatized the Jewish community and inspired a literary response in Morocco and beyond. This study focuses on works written in the first century after her death in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo- Spanish-Spanish and French that tell her story and interpret its meaning. The author places both the event and the texts that narrate it in their historical context and shows how its significance changed in each language and literary setting. The texts, prose and poetic laments by North African rabbis and a romantic feuilleton from the Judeo-Spanish press, and their historical context reveal the complex relations between Jews and Muslims in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century and the intersection between religious polemics and gender discourse.

SHARON VANCE, Ph.D. (2005) in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania, is an Assistant Professor of History at Northern Kentucky University. She has published articles in Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (Indiana University Press, forthcoming) and Genesis Revista della Societa Italiana della Storiche, as well as in the Encyclopaedia of Jews in Islamic World (Brill, 2010).

"In the year 1834 there occurred a sad incident that will never depart from Moroccan Jewish memory." This is how Jacob Toledano began to tell the story of Sol Hatchuel, also known as Suleika,' a young Jewish girl from Tangier who was executed in Fez for apostasy from Islam after her Muslim neighbors testified that she converted. The raw emotion felt by the entire community can be seen in a lament in JudeoArabic by Moshe Ben Sa'adon written shortly after her execution, "Waili [What a great misfortune for me] over what happened... to this virgin. I will cry and moan for that which has happened... nothing [else] like it has happened in my time." Her public beheading sparked a wave of grief that found its expression in written and oral form. She was eulogized in Hebrew laments (qinot), Judeo-Arabic tales (qissas) and Judeo-Spanish ballads (romanceros). In European languages her story has been rendered in a wide variety of genres from an epic poem,' to French melodrama,' to a painting in oil on canvas.' Out of this mass of material I selected works written in European languages by diplomats and travelers and in Jewish languages by Sephardic writers in the first century after her death. The latter works consist of Hebrew texts written by Moroccan Jews, including four published qinot, two published prose texts, two Judeo-Arabic qissas (tales), and a romanso (serialized novel) published in the Judeo-Spanish newspaper La Epoka in 1902. This diverse set of texts provides the opportunity to compare different versions of the same story to see how the context of language, culture and historical circumstances, in addition to the author's worldview, affected the way Sol's story was told. What role did culture, language and theology play in shaping its different versions? Did contemporary politics play any role in these accounts of her martyrdom?

While the basic facts can be gathered from these documents, namely that she was a young Jewish girl born in Tangier and publically executed in Fez in 1834, there are some crucial differences in the various accounts, namely the question of whether she converted to Islam or expressed an interest in converting. Moreover, these accounts gave alternative interpretations to the meaning of her sacrifice and the lessons that should be drawn from her story. Over the years the number of works recounting her martyrdom has accumulated. It is important to keep in mind that many texts are still in manuscript form and are housed in both public archives and private collections. In addition, there is the oral tradition of legends, some of which have been collected by the Israel Folklore Archives. It is impossible to do a thorough study of all the written and oral works devoted to Sol, particularly given the fact that her story continues to be retold in both written and oral form and is an ongoing tradition that generates new texts." Instead this study focuses on written sources from the first century after Sol's death. These works were written in European languages by Jews and non Jews as well as in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Spanish. Chapter one reviews and compares these versions of her story, starting with the earliest published texts based on interviews with members of her family.

Chapter two places Sol's execution within the historical context of contemporary Moroccan society during her lifetime, focusing on key events that affected relations between Muslims and Jews. In addition, the reason given for her execution, that she had converted and later recanted, raises issues regarding the process of conversion and treatment of apostasy in Islam. Given that most of the sources, including the historical sources based on testimony from Sol's family state that she did not convert, but Muslim witnesses testified that she did, the status of non-Muslims in Islamic courts is crucial. In order to understand this status it is important to consider the position of non-Muslims in traditional Muslim society in general and the status of Jews in Moroccan society in particular. While Islamic laws regarding restrictions on non-Muslims are well established, they were not consistently enforced over time. In order to understand why this is so and what factors affected how severely these laws were enforced one needs to consider the role that Moroccan Jews played in the society as well as the relative balance of power between the Sultan and the guardians of Islamic law, the ulama. These relations also changed over time and underwent profound transformations in the course of the 19th century.

In addition, relations between Morocco and Europe changed in this period and the Solika texts written by Europeans over the course of the century reflected that change.

In contrast the Moroccan Hebrew texts were written within the framework of rabbinic Judaism, which embedded the significance of Sol's martyrdom within the sacred historical conception of exile and redemption (galut u-ge'ulah). This conception was essential to Jewish identity and faith in the face of immediate Muslim religious challenges and theological polemics that predate Islam. Along with this atmosphere of religious debate there also existed a realm of shared popular beliefs between the two traditions. These took the form of pilgrimage rituals to Sol's gravesite and hagiographic tales about her. Another level of shared culture is the Andalusian Maghrébine literary tradition, which can be seen in the poetic elegies. The elegies (qinot) analyzed in chapter four combine this shared culture of Arabic poetics at the level of form with the Jewish liturgical poetry and interweaving of Biblical verses in the melisah style. These poetic devices provide the aesthetic form for conveying the polemical content discussed in the previous chapter. Together they establish the thematic structure of all the Moroccan texts that tell Sol's story within the context of rabbinic Judaism as it developed in the Andalusian and Moroccan tradition. In the Moroccan Hebrew texts the issue of gender discourse is interconnected with religious polemics at a number of levels. At the symbolic level relations between God and Israel are seen as a monogamous heterosexual marriage and Sol's discourse in these texts reinforces this conception through her polemical rejection of both Islam and would be Muslim suitors. At the sociolinguistic level, the division between women's discourse and education and men's gives Sol's learned disputation with her Muslim captors in these texts a dearth of plausibility, even as they convey a rich multi-layered web of connotations and meanings.

Chapter five analyzes two manuscripts in Judeo-Arabic, one from Morocco, the other from Algeria. The first bears the title date of 1835 and continues in the Moroccan Hebrew rabbinic tradition, but given that it is written in the colloquial dialect gives voice to the fears and terror of a frightened young girl to a greater extent than the learned Hebrew works. Sol's voice is also reinforced in this text by being written in the first person. In contract, the text from Algeria dates to the end of the 19th century and breaks with the rabbinic tradition. This break is emblematic of the rupture the Jewish community found itself in as a result of the French conquest of Algeria and the French Consistory's challenge to Algerian rabbinic Judaism as well as the wave of anti-Semitic violence that swept through Algeria at the end of the 19th century.

On the other side of the Mediterranean the Jewish community of Salonika was also experiencing profound changes at the start of the 20th century and these changes are reflected in the version of Sol's story published in the Judeo-Spanish newspaper La Epoka. This paper and its editor supported the modernizing program of both the Tanzimat Reforms and the school system of the Alliance Israelite Universelle. One way this reform movement's culture spread was through the Judeo-Spanish press and through the genre of the serialized translated novel, the romanso. This genre was an expression of the westernizing reform program that combined openness to European culture with an adaptation of its literature to local cultural sensitivities. In keeping with this generic convention, La Epoka based its version of Sol's story not on the Moroccan rabbinic tradition, but on one of the earliest Spanish texts devoted to Sol. This text was paraphrased and altered to suit the modernizing message of La Epoka's editorial line. While the text was written in 1902, four decades before the destruction of Salonikan Jewry, its tragic ending foreshadowed the doomed fate of both the story's protagonists and this community. What all of these texts had in common was that they told Sol's story in away that expressed both their veneration of her and the relevance of her story to their contemporary reality.

 

 

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